Last year I created and posted a few helpful garden journal printables, including a seed starting guide and a pest and disease log. I never did finish out the series because, well – life happens. This year I decided to update the printables just a little and continue the series.

First up is the Seed Staring Log. If you’re going to start your plants from seeds indoors, this is the first thing you need to fill out. The first step is finding out when the last estimated date of frost is for your climate zone. I use the Farmer’s Almanac website for this.

From there, you can determine when and how to start your seeds. There are lots of guides online for the best time to start different vegetable seeds, but I prefer to go by the directions on each individual seed packet. Generally they will tell you to sow the seeds indoors x number of weeks before the last frost date. Since we’ve already determined our last frost date, you can simply count backwards from that date to determine when to sow.

To see how I start my seeds indoors using newspaper seed pots, click here and here.

If you plan on doing square-foot gardening like I do, it’s helpful to have a map to lay out where you will be planting things ahead of time.

Alternatively, I really like the Garden Planner on the Gardener’s Supply Company website. You can customize the size of your square-foot garden layout and drag and drop different vegetables and plants into each square. The best part is it automatically shows you how many of each type of plant can be planted in one square-foot. For example, while you can only plant 1 tomato plant in a square foot, you could plant 4 bean plants or 16 carrots in the same space.

I happen to use both. I play around with the layout on the Gardener’s Supply website until I’m happy with it, then I write down the final layout on my own map that will go into my Garden Journal.

The final printable for my Garden Journal is one that I hope I won’t have to use – but is definitely helpful to have on hand. This pest and disease log has spaces to identify the issue you had with your plant, what method you tried to correct it, and whether or not it worked. This will be invaluable information if a few years down the road I have an identical issue and don’t quite remember what I used to treat it the first time.

As time goes on, I will continue to update you on the status of my Garden Journal. I hope to make it part log, part journal, part scrapbook. So, during these frigid months I can look back on my beautiful bounty. As well as having a solid history of what I have planted and used, and what was successful.

If you’d like to use any of my updated Garden Journal printables just click the links below to get a printable PDF file of each sheet.

Hi there just wanted to give you a quick heads up and let you know a few of the images aren’t loading correctly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different browsers and both show the same results.